Deep Down in the Darkness: The London Underground in British Urban Fantasy
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The Underground is one of the universally recognizable symbols of London. It spans over Victorian, Edwardian, modern and postmodern periods and reflects their world-views. As the first underground passenger railway in the world, it forced Londoners to deal with entirely new concepts, such as the vertical porosity of the city; therefore it has been an important topic in literature from the very beginning. The Underground has acquired rich layers of often contradictory legends, myths and experiences amassed and shared by its users. With the rise of urban fantasy as a distinctive genre and its growing popularity and diversification, the Underground has been explored from new points of view. Given the supernatural apparatus at their disposal, urban fantasy authors often take the existing concepts to extremes. These occurrences then either establish new themes in the London Underground canon, such as the Underground as a portal to fantastical worlds, or add to one already existing, such as fear of being underground. The proposed paper identifies these new themes in a corpus of British urban fantasy novels from 1988 to 2018 by Neil Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, China Miéville and others, connects them to real-life historical and cultural events, and compares them with the previous treatment of the Underground in fiction. |
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